“Vice” ventures into new territory for newsmagazines

Updated 3:38 pm, Tuesday, April 2, 2013

“Vice,” HBO's edgy news series, hasn't even made it out of the gate and already it's steeped in controversy.

A national media storm erupted last month over an upcoming story involving former San Antonio Spur Dennis Rodman and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The reaction must have brought a smile to the face of “Vice” host Shane Smith.

“The first criteria is, 'Does it punch you in the face?'” Smith said of stories considered for the half-hour series, bowing at 10 p.m. Friday. “Is it unlike anything you've seen anywhere else?”

The one that has flamboyant Rodman hobnobbing with Kim certainly promises to meet both conditions. According to news reports, it started with an exhibition basketball game featuring three Harlem Globetrotters in the North Korean city of Pyongyang, an ingenious strategy to get the show's cameras into the secretive nation. Rodman acted as a kind of U.S. sports emissary.

As it turned out, Kim — a big basketball fan — came to watch, and as ABC's “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” reported, warmly welcomed the Americans. He sat with Rodman at the game and treated the former NBA star and the others to all kinds of niceties, including dinner and drinks.

This led to astonishing statements from Rodman about Kim, known as an oppressive leader and U.S. foe, a man who has defied U.N. sanctions by developing North Korea's nuclear arms program.

As for the resulting “Vice” piece, viewers will have to wait a bit. HBO reports it likely will be “Vice's” season finale in May.

“There's lots of footage, and they're just starting to put it together,” Diego Aldana, vice president of media relations for HBO, wrote in an e-mail. “Rodman was there for a few days, and our correspondent and the Globetrotters stuck around for another six days afterward and did some very interesting things, so it should be fascinating.”

Screeners of initial episodes indicate that there's much more to “Vice” than Rodman doing North Korea. The revolutionary newsmagazine, co-executive-produced by Smith and Bill Maher, presents in-depth international news stories that you likely won't find on mainstream news broadcasts.

The series sprang from the already infamous “Vice” brand of fringe journalism, which began with a magazine on pop culture and branched out to online videos and feature-length documentaries (“Heavy Metal in Baghdad”).

The approach of the HBO series is thorough, yet engagingly intimate. Host Smith and “Vice” correspondents Ryan Duffy and Thomas Morton frequently put themselves in the middle of harrowing — sometimes risky — situations. In one scary segment on the Indian-Pakistan border, Smith places his foot perilously close to Kashmir's line of control — dubbed “the world's most dangerous border.”

Normally, however, he takes safety seriously.

“We practice a type of journalism we call immersionism where we go and stay in the area for long periods of time. We stay with local people,” Smith said at an HBO press session. “We don't try to be intrusive. We just try to be smart about it. We're not action junkies or anything like that. We just want to get the good story.”

Friday's premiere features stories involving children. Some are exploited; others are put in mortal danger. The first, “Assassination Nation,” takes us to the Philippines where, as “Vice” reports, election season is more like hunting season. Instead of running campaigns, candidates and their opponents amass guns and use them to rub out adversaries. In the 2010 election, “Vice” states, 100-plus people were killed in such violence; many of the guns used are made illicitly from scrap metal.

“We actually go to some of these underground factories where children as young as 11 years old are learning how to make weapons from scrap that can't be traced because they're used in assassinations,” Smith said.

“Killer Kids in the Taliban,” the second segment, may be even more disturbing. As American troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, confused children, some as young as 6, are recruited by the Taliban to be suicide bombers. “Vice” meets with a few of these youngsters, who were captured before they blew themselves and others up. What they have to say is eye-opening and heartrending.